"Let Me Repeat"

The poem had a place of prominence on our kitchen bulletin board for many years. We had clipped it from a women's magazine, and although it was too sugary and sentimental for my personal literary taste, it was very encouraging to my wife and me as we raised our teenage daughters. The poem was written by an early middle-aged mother and described a visit she had with her daughter, now grown, over tea one fine afternoon.

We have long lost our copy of that poem, but its message remains as clear as day. The poem relates how, over tea that day, the younger woman thanked her mother for all the lessons she learned from her. She confessed that she once found her mother's repetitive teachings about proper behavior to be useless and annoying. But she now had come to appreciate just how useful and important those teachings were. She thanked her mother for what she learned and expressed special gratitude for her patient reiteration of those lessons. The mother ends her poem with an expression of pride in herself and in her daughter.

This poem and its lesson came to mind recently—just the other day, in fact—when

I visited the synagogue where I served as rabbi some years ago. A young man whom I remembered as a teenager approached me and said that he felt he owed me an apology. He proceeded to tell me how sorry he was for not appreciating my tendency, in my sermons and lectures, to repeatedly emphasize the importance of the precise translation of Hebrew words and phrases.

"Each time that you would insist that the common translation of, for example, kedusha as 'holiness' was not quite accurate, we kids would roll our eyes in exasperation. You would sometimes do that three or four times in just one sermon." He then told me how he and his friends had come to understand the importance of nuance, especially in rendering biblical Hebrew into English.

I must confess that even today I preserve that tendency to repeat myself, and it is not always attributable to my increasingly frequent "senior moments." Quite the contrary; I consciously and intentionally repeat matters that I think are important, especially in my public speeches. I base my conviction that repetition is necessary and effective upon a comment by a great man on a passage in this week's Torah portion, Parshat Chukat (Numbers 19:1-22:1).

The story is well known. The Children of Israel complain to Moses and Aaron about the lack of water in the wilderness. They fall upon their faces in prayer, and the Almighty responds by telling Moses to take